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(Update, October 2009.)
Adeona depends on the availability of a separate service,
OpenDHT. On July 1, OpenDHT
was taken down. We have taken the opportunity to set up OpenDHT
again on PlanetLab, under our administration. However, we are still
testing our OpenDHT infrastructure. Therefore, at this time we are
not encouraging new downloads of Adeona.

Overview

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost
or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.
This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no
need to rely on a single third party.
What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing
commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving.
This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing)
can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona
can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where
they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT
distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small
software client installed on an owner's laptop. The client
continually monitors the current location of the laptop,
gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network
topology) that can be used to identify its current
location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms
to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the
ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and
unlinkable. At the same time, it is
easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

How do I use it?

Why Adeona?

With the growing ubiquity of, and user reliance on, mobile computing
devices (laptops, PDAs, smart phones, etc.), loss or theft of a device
is increasingly likely, disruptive, and costly. Internet-based
tracking systems provide a method for mitigating this risk. These
tracking systems send, over the Internet, updates regarding the current
location of the device to a remotely administered repository. If the
device is lost or stolen, but maintains Internet connectivity and
unmodified software, the tracking system can keep tabs on the current
whereabouts of the device. This data could prove invaluable when the
appropriate authorities attempt to recover the device.

Unfortunately, with current proprietary tracking systems users
sacrifice location privacy. Indeed, even while the
device is still in the rightful owner's possession, the
tracking system is keeping tabs on the locations it (and its
owner) visit. Even worse, with some commercial
products, even outsiders (parties not affiliated with the
tracking provider) can "piggy-back" on the tracking system's
Internet traffic to uncover a mobile device user's private
information and/or locations visited.

Adeona has three main properties:

Private:
Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that
the owner is the only party that can use the
system to reveal the locations visited by a device.

Open source and free:
Adeona's software is licensed under GPLv2. While your locations
are secret, the tracking system's design is not.

The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of
the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the
freeware tool isightcapture.
Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so
that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can
access them. Here are some examples:

The History of Adeona

Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns. This system
is the result of recent academic research started at the University of
Washington, with participants now also at the University of California
San Diego and the University of California Davis. The foundations of
the Adeona design — and an analysis of its security and privacy
properties — are published in a research paper
at the 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.